The Cyclical Nature of Storage

Perhaps I should have entitled this post “The Cyclical Nature of IT” because the same principles apply. Over time, storage moves back and forth between fully dispersed and fully centralized like a sine wave on an oscilloscope.

The EvidenceLook at the evidence. In the 1950′s and 1960′s there was no choice but to be centralized. All we had was mainframe and dumb disk drives. Storage needed a controller the size of a fridge to work and so was never going to be distributed to the masses any time soon.

Then in the late 1970s, in comes Al Shugart and Seagate, giving us the first drive in a format we recognize today – the ST506. As soon as that point is reached, we can now deploy our own servers with dedicated storage and so we had the distributed storage sprawl of the early 1990s.

This quickly evolved into SAN storage, which brought us back to that centralised storage model. Since then, we’re starting to see the centralized model fall apart as storage once again goes distributed. What’s the evidence for this?

The days of the “single large storage array” are over – SSD arrays, unified storage, dedicated NAS, object, all exist

Of course the de-centralization of storage is done for good reasons, whether that’s cost, increased performance or otherwise gaining business advantage.

The Architects ViewNo doubt, we will see storage diverge further as more bespoke solutions come to the market. It’s then easy to predict that storage will once again centralize. The skill will be in making the prediction on why and when this will happen. Anyone like to place a bet?